Part 4

And herewith I come to a curious and interesting point. Mr. E.A. Baughan, an English critic of authority, who has written with both courage and wisdom concerning Wagnerian theories and practices, entertains singular views concerning the nature of music-drama as an art form. "There must be no false ideas of music-drama being drama," he has asserted: "it is primarily music. The drama of it is merely," he goes on, "the motive force of the whole, and technically takes the place of form in absolute music"--a sentence which, one may be permitted to observe, would contain an admirably concise statement of the truth if the word "merely" were left out. Mr. Baughan is led by this belief to take the position that whereas, in one respect Wagner was, to put it briefly, too musical, in another respect he was not musical enough. He acknowledges the fact that in Wagner's combination of music and drama, the music, so far as the orchestra is concerned, assumes an oppressive and obstructive prominence; it indulges for the most part, he holds, in a "superheated commentary" which leaves little to suggestion, which is persistently excessive and overbearing; yet at the same time Mr. Baughan holds that Wagner, in his treatment of the voice-parts, did not, as he says, "make use of the full resources of music and of the beautiful human singing-voice in duets, concerted numbers, and choruses." It is the second of these objections which, as it seems to me, contains matter for discussion. So far from being deficient in melodious effectiveness, Wagner's writing for the voice, I would hold, errs upon the other side. It would be possible to name page after page in the "Ring" and "Tristan" which is marred, from a musico-dramatic standpoint, by an excess of lyricism. It is a little difficult to understand, for example, how Wagner would have justified his admission of the duet into his carefully reasoned scheme; for if the ensemble piece--the quartette in "Rigoletto," for example--is inherently absurd from a dramatic point of view, as it incontrovertibly is, so also is the duet. Even the most liberal attitude toward the conventions of the operatic stage makes it difficult to tolerate what Mr. W.P. James describes as the spectacle of two persons inside a house and two outside, supposed to be unconscious of each other's presence, making their remarks in rhythmic and harmonic consonance. Yet is Wagner much less distant from the dramatic verities when, in the third act of "Die Meistersinger," he ranges five people in the centre of a room and causes them to soliloquise in concert, to the end of producing a quintette of ravishing musical beauty? Had he wholly freed himself from what he regarded as the musical bondage of his predecessors when he could tolerate such obvious anachronisms as the duet, the ensemble piece, and the chorus? The truth of the matter seems to be that if Wagner's music, in itself, were less wonderful and enthralling than it is, those who would fain insist upon a decent regard for dramatic consistency in the lyric-drama would not tolerate many things in the vocal writing in "Tristan," "Meistersinger," the "Ring" and "Parsifal" which are not a whit more dramatically reasonable than the absurdities which Wagner contemptuously derided in the operas of the old school. His vocal writing, far from being deficient in melodic quality, far from ignoring "the full resources of music and of the beautiful singing voice," is saturated and overflowing with musical beauty, and with almost every variety of melodic effectiveness except that which is possible to purely formal song. Mr. Baughan complains that the voice-parts have "no independent life" of their own. "In many cases," he says, "the vocal parts, if detached from the score [from the orchestral support] are without emotional meaning of any kind--the expression is absolutely incomplete." An astonishing complaint! For the same thing is necessarily true of any writing for the voice allied with modern harmony in the accompaniment. How many songs written since composers began to discover the modulatory capacities of harmony, one might ask Mr. Baughan, would have "emotional meaning," or any kind of expression or effect, if the voice part were sung without its harmonic support?

No; Wagner cannot justly be convicted of a paucity of melodic effect in his writing for the voice. He would, one must venture to believe, have come closer to realising his ideal of what a music-drama should be if, in the first place, he had been able and willing to restrain the overwhelming tide of his orchestral eloquence; and if, in the second place, he had been content to let his _dramatis personæ_ employ, not (in accordance with Mr. Baughan's wish) a form of lyric speech richer in purely musical elements of effect, but one of more naturalistic contour, simpler, more direct, less ornately and intrusively melodic in its utterance of the text.

It would be fatuous, of course, to deny that there are passages in Wagner's later music-dramas to which one can point, by reason of their continent and transparent expression of the dramatic situation, as examples of a perfect kind of music-drama: which satisfy, not only every conceivable demand for fullness of musical utterance (for that Wagner almost always does), but those intellectual convictions as to what an ideal music-drama should be which he himself was pre-eminently instrumental in diffusing. In such passages his direct and pointedly dramatic use of the voice, and his discreet and sparing, yet deeply suggestive, treatment of the orchestral background, are of irresistible effect. How admirable, then, is his restraint! As in, for example, _Waltraute's_ narrative in "Götterdämmerung"; the early scenes between _Siegmund_ and _Sieglinde_, and _Brunnhilde's_ announcement of the decree of death to the Volsung, in "Walküre"; and in "Tristan" the passage wherein the knight proffers to _Isolde_ his sword; the opening of the third act; and the first sixteen measures that follow the meeting of the lovers in the second act--where the breathless, almost inarticulate ecstasy of the moment is uttered with extraordinary fidelity, only to lead into a passage wherein the pair suddenly recover their breath in time to respond to the need of battling against one of the most glorious but dramatically inflated outpourings of erotic rapture ever given to an orchestra.

But scenes of such perfect musico-dramatic adjustment are rare in Wagner. It is not likely, in view of his insuperable propensity toward musical rhetoric and his amazingly fecund eloquence, that, even if he had kept a more sternly repressive hand upon his impulse toward musical elaboration, he could have accomplished the union of drama and music in that exquisite and scrupulously balanced relationship which produces the ideal music-drama. That achievement had to wait until the materials of musical expression had attained a greater ductility and variety, and until the intellectual and æsthetic seed which Wagner sowed had ripened into a maturer harvest than was possible in his own time--it had to wait, in short, until to-day. For there are those of us who believe that the feat has at last been actually achieved--that the principles of musico-dramatic structure inimitably stated by Gluck in his preface to "Alceste" have been, for the first time, carried out with absolute fidelity to their spirit; and, moreover, with that cohesion of organism which Gluck signally failed to achieve, and with that fineness of dramatic instinct the lack of which is Wagner's prime deficiency.

IV

It is not every generation that can witness the emergence of a masterpiece which may truly be called epoch-making; yet when France--not the Italy of Peri and Monteverdi; nor the Germany of Gluck and Wagner--produced, doubtless to the stupefaction of the shades of Meyerbeer, Bizet, and Gounod, the "Pelléas et Mélisande" of Claude Debussy, it produced a work which is as commanding in quality as it is unique in conception and design.

It has been left for Debussy to write an absolutely new page in the eventful history of the opera. This remarkable composer is to-day regarded with suspicion by the vigilant conservators of our musical integrity--those who are vigorous and unconquerable champions of æsthetic progress so long as it involves no change in established methods and no reversal of traditions; for he has shown a perverse disinclination to conform to those rules of procedure which, in music as in the other arts, are held to be inviolable until they are set aside by the practice of successive generations of inspired innovators. He has, in brief, affronted the orthodox by creating a form and method of his own, and one which stubbornly refuses to square with any of the recognised laws of the game. He is nowhere so significant a phenomenon to the curious student of musical development as in his setting of Maeterlinck's drama. For the first time in the history of opera we are confronted here with the spectacle of a lyric-drama in which, while the drama itself holds without compromise the paramount place in the structural scheme, the musical envelope with which it is surrounded is not only transparent and intensifying, but, as music, beautiful and remarkable in an extraordinary degree. The point to be emphasised is this: that the postulate of Count Bardi's sixteenth century "reformers," formulated by Gluck almost two hundred years later in the principle that the true function of music in the opera is "to second poetry in expressing the emotions and situations of the plot," has its first consistent and effective application in Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande." What the _Camerata_, and their successors, could not accomplish for lack of adequate musical means, what Gluck fell short of compassing for want of boldness and reach of vision, what Wagner might have effected but for too great a preoccupation with one phase of the problem, a Frenchman of to-day has quietly and (I say it deliberately) perfectly achieved.

His success is as much a result of time and circumstance and the slow growth of the art as of a preeminent natural fitness for the task. The Florentines, for all their eagerness and sincerity, were helpless before the problem of putting their principles into concrete and effective form, for they were hopelessly blocked by reason of the desperate poverty of the musical means at their disposal. Spurning the elaborate and lovely art of the contrapuntists, they found themselves in the sufficiently hopeless situation of artists filled with passionate convictions but without tools--in other words, they aspired to write dramatic music for single voices and instruments with nothing to aid them save a rudimentary harmonic system and an almost non-existent orchestra, and with virtually no perception of the possibilities of melodic effect. Their failure was due, not to any infirmity of purpose, but to a simple lack of materials. Of Gluck it is to be said that, ardent and admirable reformer as he was, and clear as was his perception of the rightful demands of the drama in any serious association with music, he failed, as Mr. Henry T. Finck justly says, to effect a "real amalgamation of music and drama," failed to strike out "a form organically connecting each part of the opera with every other." His unconnected "numbers," his indulgence in vocal embroidery, his retention of many of the encumbrances of the operatic machinery, are all testimony to a not very rigorous or far-seeing reformatory impulse. If, as Mr. Finck pointedly observes, he "insisted on the claims of the composer as against the singer, he did not, on the other hand, alter the relations of poet and composer. Such a thing as allowing the drama to condition the form of the music never occurred to him." A spontaneous master of musico-dramatic speech, he stopped far short of striking out a form of lyric-drama in which the music was really made to exercise, continuously and undeviatingly, what he stated to be "its true function." It would be absurd to dispute the fact that his sense of dramatic expression was both keen and rich; but it was an instinct which manifested itself in isolated and particular instances, and it was not strong enough or exigent enough to compel him to devise a new and more intelligent manner of treating his dramatic text as a whole.

Of the degree in which Wagner fell short of embodying his principles--which were of course in essence the principles of the Florentines and of Gluck--and the evident reason for his failure, enough has already been said. So we come again to Debussy. For it is a singular fact--and this is the point to insist upon--that this French mystic of to-day is the first opera-maker in the records of musical art who has exhibited the courage, and who has possessed the means, to carry the principles of the _Camerata_, of Gluck, and of Wagner to their ultimate conclusion. In "Pelléas et Mélisande" he has made his music serve his dramatic subject, in all its parts, with absolute fidelity and consistency, and with a rigorous and unswerving logic that is without parallel in the history of operatic art; we are here as far from the method of Richard Strauss, with its translation of the entire dramatic material into the terms of the symphonic poem, and with the singing actors contending against a Gargantuan and merciless orchestra (which is nothing, after all, but an exaggeration of the method of Wagner), as we are from the futile experimentings of the _Camerata_.

V

One cannot but wonder what Hazlitt, who could not think of beauty, simplicity, or sensibility as qualities having any possible association with opera, would have said of a manner of writing for the lyric stage which ignores even those opportunities for musical effect which composers of unimpeachable artistic integrity have always held to be desirable and legitimate. There is an even richer invitation to the Spirit of Comedy in trying to imagine what Richard Wagner would have said to the suggestion of a lyric-drama in which the orchestra is not employed at its full strength more than three times in the course of a score almost as long as that of "Tristan und Isolde," and in which the singers scarcely ever raise their voices above a _mezzo-forte_. Debussy's orchestra is unrivalled in musico-dramatic art for the exquisite justness with which it enforces the moods and action of the play. It never seduces the attention of the auditor from the essential concerns of the drama itself: never, as with Wagner, tyrannically absorbs the mind. Always in this unexampled music-drama there is maintained, as to emphasis and intensity, a scrupulous balance between the movement of the drama and the tonal undercurrent which is its complement: the music is absolutely merged in the play, suffusing it, colouring it, but never dominating or transcending it. It is for this reason that it deserves, as an exemplification of the ideal manner of constructing a music-drama, the hazardous epithet "perfect"; for it is, one cannot too often repeat, a work far more faithful to Wagner's avowed principles than are his own magnificently inconsistent scores. In this music there is no excess of gesture, there is none of Wagner's gorgeously expansive rhetoric: the "Je t'aime," "Je t'aime aussi" of Debussy's lovers are expressed with a simplicity and a stark sincerity which could not well go further; and it is a curious and significant fact that the moment of their profoundest ecstasy, though it is artfully and eloquently prepared, is represented in the orchestra by a blank measure, a moment of complete silence. This, indeed, is almost the supreme distinction of Debussy's music-drama: that it should be at once so eloquent and so discreet: that it should be, in the exposition of its subject-matter, so rich and intense yet so delicately and heedfully reticent. After the grave speech and simple gestures of these naïve yet subtle and passionate tragedians, as Debussy has translated them into fluid tone, the posturings and the rhetoric of Wagner's splendid personages seem, for a time, violently extravagant, excessive, and overwrought. To attempt to resist the imperious sway which the most superb of musical romantics must always exert over his kingdom would be a futile endeavour; yet it cannot be denied that for some the method of Debussy as a musical dramatist will seem the more viable and the more sound, as it is grateful to the mind a little wearied by the drums and tramplings of Wagnerian conquests.

His use of the orchestra differs from Wagner's in degree rather than in kind. As he employs it, it is a veracious and pointed commentary on the text and the action of the play, underlining the significance of the former and colouring and intensifying the latter; but its comments are infinitely less copious and voluble than are Wagner's--indeed, their reticence and discretion are, as it has been said, extreme. Debussy's choric orchestra is often as remarkable for what it does not say as for what it does. Can one, for example, imagine Wagner being able to resist the temptation to indulge in some graphic and detailed tone-painting, at the cost of delaying the action and overloading the score, at the passage wherein _Golaud_, coming upon the errant and weeping _Mélisande_ in the forest, and seeing her crown at the bottom of the spring where she has thrown it, asks her what it is that shines in the water? Yet observe the curiously insinuating effect which results from Debussy's deft and reticent treatment of this episode--the _pianissimo_ chords on the muted horns, followed by a measure in which the voices declaim alone. And would not Wagner have wrung the last drop of emotion out of the death scene of _Mélisande_?--a scene for which Debussy has written music of almost insupportable poignancy, yet of a quality so reserved and unforced that it enters the consciousness almost unperceived as music.

The discursive and exegetical tendencies of Wagner are forgotten; nor are we reminded of the manner in which Strauss, in his "Salome," overlays the speech and action of the characters with a dense, oppressive, and many-stranded web of tone. Yet always Debussy's musical comment is intimately and truthfully reflective of what passes visibly upon the stage and in the hearts of his dramatic personages; though often it transmits not so much the actual speech and apparent emotions of the characters, as that dim and pseudonymous reality,--"the thing behind the thing," as the Celts have named it,--which hovers, unspoken and undeclared, in the background of Maeterlinck's wonderful play. We are reminded at times, in listening to this lucent and fluid current of orchestral tone, of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's description of the voice of his _Elen_: "... it was taciturn, subdued, like the murmur of the river Lethe, flowing through the region of shadows." This orchestra, seldom elaborate in thematic exfoliation, and still less frequently polyphonic in texture, is, for the most part, a voice that speaks in hints and through allusions. The huge and imperious eloquence of Wagner is not to be sought for here. Taine once spoke of the "violent sorcery" of Victor Hugo's style, and it is a phrase that comes often to the mind in thinking of the music of the titanic German. Debussy in his "Pelléas" has written music that is rich in sorcery; but it is not violent. In it inheres a capacity for expression, and a quality of enchantment in the result, that music had not before exerted--an enchantment that invades the mind by stealth yet holds it with enchaining power. In a curious degree the music is both contemplative and impassioned; its pervading note is that of still flame, of emotional quietude--the sweeping and cosmic winds of "Tristan und Isolde" are absent. Yet the dramatic fibre of the score is strong and rich; for all its fineness and delicacy of texture and its economy of accent, it is neither amorphous nor inert.

VI

_Tristan_ and _Isolde_, in moments of exalted emotion, utter that emotion with the frankest lyricism; _Pelléas_ and _Mélisande_, in moments of like fervour, still adhere to the unformed and unsymmetrical declamation in which their language is elsewhere couched. It is the orchestra which sings--which, passionately or meditatively, colours the dramatic moment. Wherein we come to what is perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this extraordinary score: the treatment of the voice-parts. Debussy's accomplishment in this respect, justly summarised, is this: He has released the orchestra from its thraldom to the methods of the symphonic poem (to which Wagner committed it) by making it a background, a support, rather than a thing of procrustean dominance, thus restoring liberty and transparency of dramatic utterance to the singing actors. He himself has succinctly stated the principles which guided him in his manner of writing for the voices in "Pelléas." "I have been reproached," he has said, "because in my score the melodic phrase is always found in the orchestra, never in the voice. I wished--intended, in fact,--that the action should never be arrested; that it should be continuous, uninterrupted. I wanted to dispense with parasitic musical phrases. When listening to a [musico-dramatic] work, the spectator is wont to experience two kinds of emotion: the musical emotion on the one hand; and the emotion of the character [in the drama], on the other. Generally these are felt successively. I have tried to blend these two emotions, and make them simultaneous. Melody is, if I may say so, almost anti-lyric, and powerless to express the constant change of emotion or life. Melody is suitable only for the song [_chanson_], which confirms a fixed sentiment. I have never been willing that my music should hinder ... the changes of sentiment and passion felt by my characters. Its demands are ignored as soon as it is necessary that these should have perfect liberty in their gestures as in their cries, in their joys as in their sorrow."